A 700-ton central plant room for a 10-story office building — chillers, pumps, boilers, cooling tower, and the redundancy strategy, hydraulic calculations, and seismic bracing that all have to close in the same room.
The project brief: the central mechanical room for a 250,000 sq ft commercial office building, sized against a 700-ton peak cooling load and an 8,000,000 Btu/hr peak heating load. Unlike the earlier real projects in this program, which each center on a single system, a central plant room means the chilled water, condenser water, and heating hot water systems — plus the redundancy strategy tying them together — all have to be sized, laid out, and commissioned in one coordinated space.
This module walks the whole project the way a real HVAC design engineer would: why closed-loop chilled water pump head calculations never include the building's floor-to-floor elevation as static head; why chiller, pump, and cooling tower selections are sized against a single-unit-failure redundancy case rather than the shared design-day load; a worked expansion tank sizing calculation showing why the heating loop, not the chilled water loop, actually drives that number; and a worked vibration-isolation and seismic-bracing calculation for the chillers, including why isolation springs and seismic snubbers serve two entirely different jobs. The full worked numbers, complete bill of materials, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.